The Problem with Bones

By Linda Niehoff

Zelia used to love going to work at the natural history museum. She also loved Guim, the collections director. That all changed when Guim got a ghost.

The Problem with Bones is a stand alone short story and is also available in The Ghost You Know.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dread Moon Press
• Release date: Jun 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215577240

Book preview

The Problem with Bones

The Problem with Bones

A Short Story

Linda Niehoff

Dread Moon Press

Copyright © 2023 by Linda Graziano-Niehoff

Cover design copyright © 2023 by Linda Graziano-Niehoff

Cover art copyright © pabkov/Depositphotos

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All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Contents

The Problem with Bones

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The Problem with Bones

Zelia used to love stepping into the museum. But not lately.

The bold creaking of the double doors, the way the bright light from the outside world was held for just a moment in the airy foyer before it was shushed down into the deep, reverent dark of the displays. The click of her heels along the marble floors and the way it echoed as if she had stepped inside a cathedral. Unless there was the shuffle of school children or a Saturday afternoon crowd. But on a Tuesday and this early, it was quiet enough that it took in only her. Repeating back her steps in a stony heartbeat.

It shouldn’t be quiet. Or at least it hadn’t been in some time. Which meant that visitors had grown bored. Something they all suspected. But after a sensation like the one they’d had over the past two years, it was hard to go back to the quiet. It felt like failing.

She knew Guim thought it was a failure. He’d been odd lately. A man possessed.

Above her just inside the doors, a giant mosasaur curled around like a grand bony staircase circling the foyer. Its head looked like an alligator’s. Its body a snake but with flipper hands. Its giant mouth hung open, smiling down at her in a constant wait. Once underwater, its browned antique bones were now relegated forever to the sky in suspended flight.

Past that, the building twisted and rose up into stairways and hallways. Leading the viewer toward displays set in massive arched windows. Zelia imagined the entire museum as an impossible manor house. One that looked out onto the plains of the Serengeti through one window. Deep under the ocean in another. There were the larger windows, but then along the sides were smaller ones, like framed pictures. A gallery of ancestors. The entire building its own impossible world all at once. Both massive and self-contained. Unrelated to the gray city outside.

No matter how many times she arrived she always moved forward before going down the long metal steps to the collections department where she worked. She looked at the displays as if looking out her own window. Looking for the pieces that she herself had handled and drawn. Watching lions in forever snarls, one reared up on hind legs. Or early man discovering fire.

The hallways smelled vaguely musty but also of something else. Something more delicate underneath. Something familiar and feminine. She didn’t mind the mustiness. Even the best libraries smelled of paper and ink and